Subprime is not a crime. Yet the terms subprime and fraud arguably are synonymous in the public mind, as a quick Google search will confirm.

Whereas subprime-mortgage brokers once offered to play hero to common people by helping them refinance their way out of crushing, self-inflicted credit card debt, now politicians attempt to play hero to those same persons as they seek an escape the burden of their self-inflicted second mortgages.

Clearly, personal responsibility means nothing anymore.

You may find it unseemly for a former subprime mortgage professional to talk so bluntly, but here is my disclaimer: I did not get rich from subprime. I’ve never even owned a home, as I was skeptical that homeownership is the essence of American success.

Does Joe Sixpack deserve a bailout – or does he deserve a thump to the rump? This is the same Joe, after all, who, by the time to came to us, had seen his mortgage application rejected by first-tier lenders, who was laughed at by auto salesmen when he attempted to buy a tricked-out SUV, and whose interest rate had been hiked up by his credit card company.

We subprimers believed poor “C-paper Joe” was worthy of a second chance that “A-paper” prime lenders wouldn’t give him – especially if Wall Street agreed to help fund that second chance – and we attempted to calculate in the extra risk that would result.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton observed 50 years ago that “half the civilized world makes a living by telling lies” – yet within the subprime lending world of high-tech snake-oil salesmen and miracle-cure hawkers, my company was surprisingly honest. We were a publicly traded company with small armies of lawyers and compliance officers. We had strict guidelines for cutting off borrowers and brokers suspected of falsifying data, and we fired loan officers if they failed to comply.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke now decries how lenders like us made loans “without regard for a borrower’s ability to repay” – but how can we forget that, only four or five years ago, Wall Street’s Ivy League MBAs calculated that those same loans were such a good long-term investment that they often could afford to pay 104 percent of the value of those loans? The best economic mind in government, Benanke’s predecessor Alan Greenspan, looked down on this arrangement and pronounced it a beneficial economic innovation.

Warren Buffett is said to have described business cycles in terms of “three I’s.” First come innovators, then come imitators, then come idiots, who mess things up badly enough to spur a new crop of innovators.

We completed the first cycle, and then Wall Street finally came to its senses and set a more realistic price for loans and forced lenders to buy back weaker loans. Those reforms quickly collapsed a bloated subprime industry and would be sufficient to prevent excesses in the next cycle. Flawed and slow as it was, the free market played Shiva more effectively than politicians would. Politicians’ pointless, continued whipping of an ailing subprime horse will in a few years lead to them condemning the remaining lenders as being too tight-fisted to give overspending Joe Sixpack a second, or third, chance.

At its peak, subprime accounted for a fifth of U.S. mortgages. The vast majority were refinances. Is subprime itself the cause of the foreclosure epidemic? Or is the real cause Americans’ commitment to overspending and undersaving, a trait exemplified by government? Even Ronald Reagan never found the nerve to pay as you go; why, then, should Joe Sixpack?

Bailing out Joe will be an endless cycle. Analysts have noted a sudden jump in the number of people borrowing from their 401-k retirement accounts to pay their bills; will there be more bailouts when these people begin defaulting on their 401-k repayments? And another one when these same people have nothing left to retire on, since Social Security funds figure to be depleted in a few decades?

Our motto is, “Don’t just stand there, blame someone.” Each week Americans misplace 12,000 laptop computers while traveling. If it could be proved (or even just insinuated) that a sinister force was sucking those laptops into another dimension, outrage would grow – and congressmen would use it to their advantage to deflect outrage from their own carelessness with our financial future.